About Me
I am alone among the pin-up artists in being entirely self-taught, I sold his first three published pin-ups to the Louis F. Dow Calendar Company in St. Paul about 1933. Until that time, I had been working as a teller in a bank in St. Joseph, Missouri. There, I met the stunning woman, Glenna, who became my wife and my first official model. I was encouraged to develop my talents by Gene Sayles, the manager of Brown and Bigelow's Kansas City branch office, I soon received my first commission from that company.To celebrate, my wife and I moved to New York and set up a penthouse studio in the Beaux Arts Building, at Eighteen East Tenth Street. Signing up with the, prestigious American Artists group, I spent the next several years working for calendar-publishing houses such as Brown and Bigelow, Joseph C. Hoover, and Louis F. Dow. Most of my pastel originals were large and bore my highly distinctive Art Deco inspired signature.Covers for Beauty Parade and the King Features Syndicate as well as calendar commissions from the Osborne and Goes companies followed in the early 1940s. In 1949, I illustrated a highly successful campaign for Botany Woollen's robes with depictions of handsome men lounging at home with their own De Vorss pin-ups.I used an incredible variety of pastel colours for my work, and applied them directly onto the board, blending them dry with my fingers. My occasional oil paintings would bear the rich, painterly brushstrokes of the Sundblom School. Like Rolf Armstrong, I always worked from live models for the final painting. I did, however, employ photographs for preliminary stages. My vibrant pin-ups, inspired by New York's theatres and nightclubs, display a fine sense of composition, a flowing, graceful line, and a daring blend of colours.
